The Miami Heat on Sunday handed the Denver Nuggets their first home defeat of the playoffs, surging in the fourth quarter for a 111-108 victory that leveled the NBA Finals at one game apiece.
Gabe Vincent scored 23 points and Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo scored 21 points apiece for Miami, who withstood a 41-point performance from Nuggets star Nikola Jokic to get the split in Denver and breathe new life into the championship campaign.
In a game of swinging shifts of momentum, the Heat had the last word, rallying from a 15-point first-half deficit and outscoring the Nuggets 36-25 in the final period as they silenced the crowd of 19,537 at Ball Arena.
Photo: Isaiah J. Downing-USA Today
Adebayo sealed it with a pair of free throws with 48.3 seconds remaining.
“We know we’ve got to do it on the defensive end,” Adebayo said of Miami’s fourth-quarter focus. “That’s the biggest thing for us. We got to do it on that end because we know we can score, all five guys we believe in. So the biggest thing for us was getting stops.”
Denver had a last chance to tie it, but Jamal Murray missed a three-pointer.
“It was a good look, just didn’t go down,” said Murray, who scored 18 points and handed out 10 assists.
Miami, who came through two play-in games and are trying to become the first eighth-seeded team to win the title, host Game 3 of the best-of-seven series tomorrow.
“We gutted out one on their home court, so time to go back to the 305,” Adebayo said referencing the Miami area code.
Miami, who were dominated in a Game 1 defeat, vowed to step it up and they started strong, leading by 11 with less than five minutes to play in the first quarter.
The Nuggets battled back and were up by 15 in the second quarter on the way to a 57-51 halftime lead, but Nuggets coach Michael Malone excoriated his team’s lack of effort.
“This is NBA Finals, we are talking about effort. That’s a huge concern of mine,” Malone said.
“We had guys out there that were just, whether feeling sorry for themselves for not making shots or thinking they can just turn it on or off. This is not the pre-season, this is not the regular season,” he said. “This is the NBA Finals. That to me is really, really perplexing, disappointing.”
The Nuggets were up by eight going into the fourth quarter, but Miami again found the way.
“I don’t think there’s a secret sauce to it,” Butler said. “I think we just move the ball, pass the ball to the open guy and play some simple basketball.”
“And we made shots. That’s what this league is, that’s what this game is, make-or-miss game, make-or-miss league,” he said. “We made some shots — they didn’t.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier